"and there was this feeling there—this overwhelming feeling of anticipated joy and unfettered possibility—that is still palpable in my consciousness. the feeling of good things—unknown and unmentionable yet vaguely familiar—to come. life, in all its glory, sprawled out in front of me in a moment." - shelley mcconkie

Sunday, July 25, 2010

I want you to find the poor here….right here in your own home first. Be the good news to your own people first. Very often we are all smiles outside, but we are all sad inside and when we come home we have no time to smile.

"I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind."

"A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely."

"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."

"The moon is whole all the time, but we can’t always see it. What we see is an almost moon or a not-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there’s only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides."

"‘You know, you’re a little complicated after all.”“Oh no,” she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really - I’m just a - I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.’"

"You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance and write poems and suffer and understand, for all of that is life."

"The human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. that death doesn’t just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed."

Monday, July 5, 2010

I HEAR I'TS BEAUTIFUL WHERE YOU'RE GOING. WITH A SHINING OF LIGHT AND A CIRCLE OF BLUE. I'TS COLD TODAY AND IT'S BEEN SNOWING. I THINK THE WORLD SHOULD WALK WITH YOU. TAKE MY HAND AND SHOW ME WHERE YOU'RE GOING NOW WE WALK AWAY WALK AWAY... SHOW ME WHERE YOU ARE AND WALK WITH ME.. THE YEARS WILL PASS AND ILL BE WAITING FOR WHEN YOU'LL WALK RIGHT THROUGH MY DOOR......

Sunday, July 4, 2010

“There is one responsibility which no man can evade and that responsibility is personal influence. Man's unconscious influence, unconscious influence, the silent, subtle radiation of his personality. The effect of his words and acts. These are tremendous. Every moment of life he is changing to a degree the life of the whole world. Every man has an atmosphere which is affecting every other. Man cannot escape for one moment from this radiation of his character. This constantly weakening of strengthening of others. He cannot evade the responsibility by saying it is an unconscious influence. He can select the qualities he would permit to be radiated. He can cultivate sweetness, calmness, trust, generosity, truth, justice, loyalty, nobility, and make them vitally active in his character. By these qualities he will constantly affect the world. This radiation to which I [4] refer comes from what a person really is, not from what he pretends to be. Every man by his mere living is radiating sympathy, sorrow, or morbidness, cynicism, or happiness or hope, or any other hundred qualities. Life is a state of radiation and absorption. To exist is to radiate. To exist is to be the recipient of radiation.” David O. McKay (http://education.byu.edu/mckay/48apr27.html )

"these fragments i have shored against my ruins."

"for now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am now."

-1 Corinthians 13:12

"A person who has good thoughts cannot ever by ugly…if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely."

--Roald Dahl

"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows.The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."

--Hemingway

"A kind of light spread out from her. and everything changed color. And the world opened out. and a day was good to awaken to. and there were no limits to anything. and the people of the world were good and handsome. and i was not afraid anymore."

--John Steinbeck, East of Eden

To love. to be loved. to never forget your own insignificance. to never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. to seek joy in the saddest places. to pursue beauty to its lair to never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch To try and understand. to never look away. and never, never to forget."

--Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

"Tell me what's the difference between hope and waiting because my heart doesn't know it constantly cuts itself on the glass of waiting

it constantly gets lost in the fog of hope."

--Anna Kamienska

"It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you can say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavours, in the air or on the tongue, half colours, too many."

--Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale

"I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

--F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

"If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves."

--Junot Diaz

"The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea."

--Isak Dinesen(psuedonym of Baroness Karen Blixen, Out of Africa)

"I also painted a study of a seascape, nothing but a bit of sand, sea, sky, grey and lonely- sometimes I feel a need for that silence- where there's nothing but the grey sea- with an occasional seabird. But otherwise, no other voice than the murmer of the waves."

--Vincent van Gogh, from letter to his brother Theo, 17 Sept. 1882

“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.”